A GOOD EXAMPLE OF BAD HEADLINE WRITING
MOOSE:
The Cincinnati Enquirer does an awful job as the region's paper of record. It is all too quick to turn small downtown-area incidents into crime waves. This story is a good example. The headline, "Short Vine on edge after recent crimes," is simply unsupported by the objective facts listed in the article.
Here are the facts listed in the article:
- "In fact, according to Cincinnati police, reported crimes in Corryville dropped from 173 in 2002 to 119 in 2006." That's a massive drop. Why isn't this the story?
- "Police, some residents and many business owners say crime isn't bad there, noting the McDonald's fatal shooting was the first homicide in that area since 2003." Now I'm not a proponent of homicide, but if there were no murders in 2004, no murders in 2005, no murders in 2006, and one in 2007, I'm not sure that we should be ready to panic.
- Half of the locals listed in the article say things like, "'I've worked here six years and never been scared,' says Nikki Smith, 24, an employee at The Cupboard, a smoke shop."
Meanwhile the suburbs have a three-man drug-fueled Heat-like murder-suicide and the Enquirer blows it off as "defying logic," "puzzling" and "bizarre." I say that you're nuts to live in the northern suburbs where yesterday's court docket included cases where rape occurs in public parks, men beat up and shoot their wives, and foster parents kill the children that they are hired to protect; come downtown where it's actually safe in spite of the Enquirer's smear campaign. (Note - all five cited stories were in today's on-line Enquirer. Guess which of the five headed the section.)
posted by UCLaw98 @ 8:44 AM
4 comments
4 Comments:
Newspapers (and TV news) only care about money. People don't pick up the paper to read feel good stories anymore then they slow down on a highway to look at flowers. They slow down on roads to stare at accidents and read papers for crime. The newspapers poor headlines are an indictment of our society in general. As someone who lived in the "northern suburbs" I am definitely puzzled by the West Chester shooting. The three were recent Mason High grads and two were A/V geeks. They apparently had enough ammo for a small war.
Monty, I don't think we are arguing that the suburbs aren't safer, I think we are arguing that the press is deliberately trying to widen the gap between what happens in the urban areas versus the surburban areas by emphasizing and deemphasizing various facts and figures within a given story. It begs the question of why this happens.
I don't think it is a conscious agenda beyond typical media sensationalism. But I also believe that there is an underlying conservative slant that tends to focus on our city. It's never spoken but I also think that it's a form of institutionalized racism.
I guess that I should chime in.
I think a lot of it is laziness. The writer has a pre-conceived idea of what the story is (crime downtown = crime wave; crime in West Chester = bizarre) in spite of the facts. The facts (from their own story) is that center city crime isn't really much of a problem.
Mind you, I'm not naive. But if you eliminate all of the OTR drug-fueled crime that happens between midnight and 4 AM, the center of the city is plainly safe, except for the occassional street beggar.
But that's not the Enquirer's "story". There's a pretty big disconnect. And it leads, as Bart (maybe) says, to a lazy institutional bias. Is that bias racial? It certianly has some characteristics of race.
-moose
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